The Remedy by Michelle Lovric Read Free Book Online Page B

made use of, before the bitter one, whilst the Worms lying in the small Guts bite and gnaw and cause the Belly-ache. For they will greedily make to the Milk, which is sweet and delicious to them, and so leaving off biting, will come out of their lurking Holes, and crawl downwards and lie ready easy to be cast out by Siege .
    When they murdered my Pa, that was a good day for me.
    For a start, I was made ward of the handsomest man in London, my Pa’s best friend, Valentine Greatrakes.
    And after that there were plenty of treats with Uncle Valentine, very nice indeed, even with his long face about my Pa’s passing.
    He kept all the details prodigious snug, as if I were a little girl. So, soon as I could, at Don Saltero’s Coffee House, I went foraging in the pockets of his greatcoat while he went out to buy a newspaper, and that’s when I found the letter from Smerghetto, the man who conducts the Venetian end of their business.
    Smerghetto had identified my Pa’s body on the slab in Venice, and this was his report.
    I scanned the letter quickly and replaced it in the pocket before my guardian returned. I resumed cheering him with choice conversation. The day proceeded to our joint satisfaction, including a vastly good spread of cakes and two cups of spiced chocolate. Then we went to Madame Cornelys’ in Knightsbridge for some sweet Asses’ Milk, which is always so renovating to the appetite. Afterward we ate cutlets and damson pudding. I like to think that I consoled Uncle Valentine considerably. He really was very finely cut up about my Pa’s death.
    “Poor little Pevenche,” he whispered sorrowfully, when he took me back to the Academy. For some reason he had not invited me togo to the theater with him. Yet it seemed to me that he could scarce stop himself weeping at our good-bye. You see, they were of the same age, and my Pa’s cut-short life must have made him think to himself. Also, my Pa was in Venice on their mutual business. You could say Uncle Valentine had sent him to his death. I saw all these thoughts soaking through that remarkable face of his when he turned it in my direction.
    Then he was gone, not before thoughtfully reminding Mistress Haggardoon to administer my Sweet Glyster without fail.
    Later, over supper, I reviewed the contents of the letter, which listed every wound on my Pa’s body in a businesslike way.
    Only the last words puzzled me: “And his face was raped with fish.”
    Smerghetto wrote as if it was clear, but for me the words conjured only blurred visions of thrashing fins and white eyes marbled with blood. I supposed that Smerghetto had botched the translation.
    He did not put forward any theories about why anyone would want to do away with my Pa. But that didn’t require too much thinking about. Apart from the matter of the fish, this kind of end is not uncommon in his line of business, which of course they all think I know nothing about, living genteelly as I do at Marylebone, in Mistress Haggardoon’s Academy for Young Ladies.
    I know plenty. I know about the rolls of nun-made lace smoothed inside the packets of chocolate. The wax figurines faintly gurgling with stashes of taxable liquors. The glass daggers verte-brating candles in wooden boxes. The hollow glass eyes, the painted bottles of holy water, the finest nostrums quackery can distil, cunningly packaged. All these things pass through Venetian hands before they make their way to the grand depository of Valentine Greatrakes at Bankside, on the wrong side of the Thames.
    There must have been one among them who thought his palm not greased as fatly as it should be?
    On the other hand, knowing my Pa, it was as like to have been a husband.

London, late November 1785

• 1 •
    A Traumatic Infusion
Take green Twigs of woody Nightshade (cut like Sarsaparilla) 4 ounces; Cochineal 1 scruple; White-wine 1 quart; infuse hot and close, all Night; then, having strained out the Liquor, add Syrup of Ground Ivy 4 ounces; Venice Treacle